Assistant Comptroller General (ACG) of Customs, Mohammed Jibo takes over the mantle of leadership of the Customs Zone A, South west as its Zonal Coordinator with a vision to harness the potential of the Service in the region for efficient trade facilitation and national security
By Innocent Chukwu
It has been proved by many great scholars of repute that many leaders are gifted with some leadership skills while others have learned and acquired leadership skills, yet according to these renown experts, a relative few are born leaders.
To the class of born leaders, research has also shown that remarkable leadership accomplishments come to them naturally because they don’t struggle to dispense their inborn skills. These all-round endowed leaders flourish in any leadership positions they find themselves despite how harsh or unyielding the environment, and they are ever successful. Their only magic wand which is not readily available to other categories of leaders remains that the Master Craftsman stuffed their inner being with immeasurable skills to lead and achieve results even under the most dismal environment. Mohammed Jibo, an Assistant Comptroller General (ACG) of Customs has an elevated position in the league of these rare leaders.
The above class of leaders is highly influential, they possess charisma, courage and uncommon inner strength to thrive where other class of leaders whine, complain and murmur. For the sake of such uncommon leaders, Nigerian scholar, Political Economist and political analyst, Professor Pat Utomi, states that “My principle of leadership is that the quest to be a leader must not be driven by vain glory, but it must be for the purpose of transforming the society”.
The ACG Jibo who was posted recently to Lagos to lead the Nigeria Customs Service’s (NCS) Zone A as its Zonal Coordinator has, ostensibly, come along with his inner qualities of strength, passion and enthusiasm to bring the best out of the Customs officers serving in the zone for the country’s wellbeing and security.
The South west Zone of the NCS commonly referred to as the Zone A, prides as the biggest zone of customs in the country, boasting of over 15 Area Commands and formations. The NCS Zone A also generates the highest revenue for the service on yearly basis. For example, the Apapa Area 1 Port, the biggest command in the Zone A, Lagos, generated over one trillion naira for the nation at the end of 2022, the highest revenue a Customs Command has ever generated in a single year since the establishment of the NCS over a century ago. Indeed, the Apapa Customs revenue stride was only achievable under the rare leadership of another uncommon leader and customs ICT and revenue czar, ACG (then Comptroller) Mallanta Yusuf, as Customs Area Controller (CAC) at the time.
The customs Zone A region has also been identified as the most notorious zone of the Service in the country on account of the high level of smuggling activities being orchestrated by notorious bands of smugglers. In fact, analysts claim it would take long years of research and intelligence commitment on the part of the Federal Government for the country to be able to reduce to barest minimum the rate of smuggling activities that go on within the South west Zone due to many porous borders with Benin Republic, and they are badly and inefficiently manned. Thus, on daily basis the NCS continues to make numerous seizures of smuggled items that hardly deter the die-hard smugglers and unpatriotic traders that seek to cut corners with any transaction.
But the new ACG Zone A leader, Jibo is not an alien to the system. At Seme Border Area Command where he led as the CAC for a few years, he was able to battle the economic saboteurs to a standstill, suppressing their activities with record seizures that are rare and hard to attain by any of his successors. It is on record that Jibo’s continuous raids on the hideouts of smugglers got to a point where the most notorious smuggling syndicate at the Seme Border down tooled and absconded. Till date, the Seme Border Area Command is still longing for the then Comptroller Jibo policing strategy-inborn leadership skills.
Besides his anti-smuggling feat at Seme Border, Jibo brought miscreants at the border to their knees when he sought for and reclaimed some pieces of land at the border belonging to the command and forced their unlawful occupants who were mostly elements that had no legitimate business at the border to flee from the reclaimed pieces of land. Jibo also fenced the land to secure it for the rightful owner, customs.
When Jibo was promoted to the rank of ACG and posted to Abuja, Customs headquarters, to occupy the office of the ACG Headquarters, his performance was quite outstanding. The ACG Headquarters office is likened to that of the Chief of Staff (COS) in political parlance. It is an office created in 2003 by the Olusegun Obasanjo government’s Customs Reforms Committee headed then by Senator Esther Nenadi Usman who was Minister of State (MoS) Finance. The ACG Headquarters position became a coordinating office for the Comptroller General of Customs (CGC) which helps the latter in handling special duties such as customs auction sales and such other duties.
It is also on record that Jibo was never found wanting by the former CGC, Col. Hameed Ali (retd) as he was said to have discharged his official assignments with excellence. ACG Jibo was said to have discharged his duties better than all his predecessors for which Ali gave him regular commendation.
Here at the Western Zonal Headquarters, Yaba Lagos as the Zonal Coordinator, Jibo has also brought the transformation agenda of the new Customs management led by Bashir Adewale Adeniyi as the acting CGC, to uplift the operating standards of the Service in the entire South west under his purview.
His arrival to Lagos has elicited great expectations from the business community and customs officers in the zone. In the coming days, the war against smuggling is expected to take a paradigm shift from the status quo because Jibo will surely demand the replication of the Seme Border anti-smuggling feat in the whole of South west region. Such move will add impetus to the security of the country against harmful drugs, illegal arms and ammunition importation among others.
In the area of trade facilitation and revenue generation, an Area Controller was recently quoted to have said that his “headache” was about how to meet and exceed his Command’s revenue target because the new management of Customs does not want to hear any excuses that can impede trade facilitation and revenue generation.
